Showbiz Is Abuzz About Spelling Bees

Who could have guessed there was this much drama in somebody trying to spell chrysanthemum?

Er, chrysanthamum.

Er, chris...

Never mind.

It wasn't so long ago that spelling bees were nobody's idea of a good time.

Well, almost nobody. The geeky kid with glasses -- the one who could not only spell ratiocination but use it in a sentence -- thought they were just fine. But he was more likely to be a target of physical abuse than a hero of stage and screen.

But that was before the 2001 novel Bee Season, the 2002 Oscar-nominated documentary Spellbound, the 2005 Broadway musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, the 2005 movie version of Bee Season and the recent movie Akeelah and the Bee turned spelling bees into a national obsession. This year the Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee -- a low-level phenomenon through its yearly ESPN broadcasts -- jumps to network prime time when ABC airs its championship episode tonight.

Now that geeky kid is a luminary. Er, lumanery.

Er, star.

"It's an American cultural phenomenon," says Rachel Sheinkin, who won a Tony for the book she wrote for Putnam County Spelling Bee. (The touring production comes to South Florida next March.)

The 19th century schoolmarms who invented the spelling bee (the term, possibly related to "quilting bee," first appears in print in 1825) probably had no intention of playing Vince Lombardi to six generations of class brainiacs. They were just looking for a congenial way to reinforce the lessons of Noah Webster's popular spelling books, first published in 1786.

Likewise, the Louisville Courier-Journal was probably just looking for publicity when it created the National Spelling Bee in 1925 -- later co-opted, in 1941, by the Scripps-Howard media chain.

How could they know that they were planting the seeds for what would become, in the fullness of time, America's biggest Revenge of the Nerds scenario?

"This is the chance for the non-athletic kids to have their moment," Sheinkin says. "It's the kids who don't get picked first in gym who are up there."

Kids like Charlie Brown, who in his first feature film A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969) competes in a national spelling bee.

But it was the Bush administration, with its emphasis on competitive academics and standardized tests, that probably set the stage for the astonishing re-emergence of the spelling bee as a pop craze. Everyone, these days, loves a spelling bee.

"You have continual suspense, unfolding letter by letter," Sheinkin says. "You have all these ups and downs in your characters' fortunes. Success or failure is only seconds away, and it's in their own hands. You have character and action built right in.

"Aristotle said that the essence of drama is fear and pity," Sheinkin says. "Where do you feel more fear and pity than when you look at a kid in a spelling bee?"